


pitiful, adjective - evoking or deserving contempt by smallness

by x (ordinary)



Series: 31 Days of Apex [3]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: (Revenant's), Brief darksparks, Canon-Typical Violence, Existential Angst, Gen, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:07:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ordinary/pseuds/x
Summary: “Don’t just stare, girlie,” he rasps, a glitching hitch weaving its way between his syllables. “Aren’t you going to finish the job?”
Series: 31 Days of Apex [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1823794
Kudos: 22





	pitiful, adjective - evoking or deserving contempt by smallness

Yellow rings track the shape of her like a targeting system locks on: slow, at first, then steady. Unwavering. She wonders what lies behind them, sometimes. It would be so easy to assume that hatred is their driving force-- that is what he would prefer everyone to think, after all. His appearance is a ghastly one, and his manner is nigh equivalent.

But there’s no way to _know_. Not for sure. 

Pieces of him shine through the cracks of an embittered thing made of and for violence, threads of his humanity that he chooses to sever at every opportunity. It comes out in bitten off words to brush off the kindness of others, in the way he so visibly shows his belly as he screams his agony of revival as he lands on the ground, fallen from the dropship like a marionette with cut strings.

She does not know him well enough to understand-- truly, “understanding” someone beyond their actions can be difficult for her even when the target of her intellectual curiosity is flesh and blood rather than steel and wires-- but she does know this:

No machine is perfect. There is _always_ room for improvement, and no engineer worth their salt would deny it. While epiphanies are the most powerful tool in the arsenal of those who create something from nothing, the attention to detail to ensure incremental progress is what separates the strong from the weak.

Natalie knows that she is the strong. It is not egotistical to think so; papa had always entrusted her with the knowledge that taking pride in your work is not the same as suffering from a case of inflated self-importance.

So she wonders, sometimes, what it would take to improve on something made to kill should the designer wish to peel back the layers of involuntarily acquired callous cruelty. Taking away the kindness in someone is far easier than repairing the damage of a hurt doled out.

He has had many, many years to become little more than a twisted scar of a machine who had once, so long ago, been a man. 

Natalie is not a fool. She knows that kindness cannot change the nature of someone so cold. You cannot help those who do not want to be helped, and Revenant seeks no assistance beyond the impossible hope to lose track of the thread of life to never find it again. He wants to be sucked into a whirlpool that has no bottom, to fall prey to what he so desperately wishes would subsume him.

That is not something she can give. 

So she stares down at him and his body-- twisted, gnarled, broken but not yet beyond repair-- and pities him.

His mouth does not move when he speaks, for he does not possess one. There is only steel and the white faceplate overlaid the deep, deep red of his chassis.

“Don’t just stare, girlie,” he rasps, a glitching hitch weaving its way between his syllables. “Aren’t you going to finish the job?”

Natalie folds her hands behind her back, blue eyes cast down on his heaping pile of parts. Someone had left him here to bleed out, except the bodies of mechanical things do not fail at the same pace of something organic.

“Yes,” she says, voice soft as her havoc rifle stays laid across her back. Its barrel is still warm from her recent escape; the echoes of that combat now distant. Revenant lays propped just past it, holed up in a corner of the hallway just past the slope of the tunnel to artillery. Some fluid is leaking from inside of him, pooling black against the concrete. “I think I should.”

“You _think_?” He laughs. It is as cold as he prefers people to perceive him to be. “Pathetic. Aren’t you a little too soft to be here, if you’re showing mercy to little old me?”

Natalie takes a delicate step forward, and then another, until she is close enough to crouch next to his immobile form. He can’t even raise his arms. Her gaze on him is sharp, discerning. They dart across the remnants of his self; parts of them blackened, other parts of them punctured. The most prominent spray pattern is that of a prowler’s. While it is a popular gun, it has notably been Loba’s preference, as of late. She has a feeling these two facts are related.

“I think you lie to us both,” she chides, thickly gloved fingers tracing along the sharp edges of a broken arm close to an elbow joint. “It is not mercy to spare your life, if it can be called so much.” When Natalie pulls her hand away, it is stained with grease. 

These are the parts of him she can understand: the most corporeal. She longs to see the way he is put together, but would prefer to do so in her garage upon a slab without the whirring of his jolting, failing frame. 

“You are too proud to ask for help. It is not hard to see, even for me.” The smile she offers Revenant is warm, syrupy. She unholsters her wingman, placing its barrel against his forehead. 

The whistle of artillery falling and the din of guns fall silent. She is running out of time to make her way to the respawn beacon, and he is not worth a loss. Wraith is counting on her, and that transcends all else.

“Do it,” he sneers, one eye flickering, but she tsks.

“Worry not, _Monsieur_ Revenant. _Je te plains_.”

His death box appears in lieu of his form, the puddle of the equivalent of viscera sticky and still spreading beneath it. She stands, wiping her dirty glove on a wall. Revenant will think little of her momentary delay; he is too embedded into his self-inflicted loops to fixate on anything outside of his desire to die, and to hurt anyone and anything in the way of it.

Natalie steps out into the light, emerging like the sun does from behind clouds. Pity is not the same as mercy, but she supposes the conclusion for him, they are one and the same. He will stay locked into his misery, blind to the possibility of a life outside of what has been rigidly forced upon him. 

She smiles as she activates the beacon, unbothered as she turns her head upwards, waiting for the falling form of someone who has broken free of such wretched chains. 

There is so, so much to live for that Revenant will never understand, and it is not her place nor desire to change his mind. He has not earned it and he never will. A self-aware machine who chooses to remain faulty, unable to divest his tragedy from his attempted reign of terror.

Wraith takes her hand as she drops, and Natalie tugs her towards his death box as it shines gold in the dark. 

“Look at all this,” Wraith murmurs as she robs his open grave, “decked out. Wasted, I’m sure.”

“You know,” Natalie says, with full surety, “yes. Yes it was.”

**Author's Note:**

> catching up slowly. the french is supposedly “i pity you” in a condescending manner. yes this is darksparks adjacent.


End file.
